Discover YOUR TRUE Competition &start=990

[Mangozoom]

Hi everyone

Just want a view on something I have just read about researching the competition for keywords.

The author of the report I read suggests that we are mislead about the amount of competition we are up against.

let me explain.

Type into Google the keyword you are trying to rank for so lets choose 'Warrior Forum'

Google results state that there are 21,200,000 pages listed for this term ... if you add quotation marks i.e. "Warrior Forum" this drops to 149,000

However if you add the characters &start=990 to the end of the google url the number drops to only 660

Apparently Google only ever list a maximum of 1000 pages and filters out everything above this so by adding &start=990 you get an accurate figure for your true competition.

Now if this is correct it changes a lot for me.

I expect there are a number of you who may have a better understanding and experience of this so please do let us have your feedback ... as I am sure I am not the only one who wants to know the truth about this.

John

[Fernando Veloso]

Hi John,

Where exactly do we place the &start=990? I did a test and no changes but maybe I am doing it the wrong way.

[ademmeda]

I also watched a video talking about this. When I tried what you suggest, it returned 255 results for "warrior forum". Now I am confused about that, which one is true. There may not be 149,000 pages having the keyword "warrior forum" on them, but I am sure there are a lot more than 255 or 660. So, can we rely on this?

[Mangozoom]

Hi Fernando

Do your search in google and once you get your result add the &start990 to the end of the google url in the browser.

John

[JohnHuizinga]

Originally Posted by ademmeda

I also watched a video talking about this. When I tried what you suggest, it returned 255 results for "warrior forum". Now I am confused about that, which one is true. There may not be 149,000 pages having the keyword "warrior forum" on them, but I am sure there are a lot more than 255 or 660. So, can we rely on this?

&start990 tells Google to go to result 990 and give you the results starting from there (990,991,992...). So it would be at least 990 + 255.

I'm probably missing something here though. How exactly is this useful?

My true competition is the 10 results on page 1 (or better yest the first 5 results). I could care less about result 1000.

[Paul Hancox]

You don't need to add it to the end, just change the URL, ie.

http://www.google.com/#q=%22warrior+forum%22&hl=en&start=280&sa=N

"start=" ... is already in that URL. I seem to get up to Page 29 in the search, and then no more results.

So where is the 149,000 pages Google says there is? Why does it stop at Page 29?

[Mangozoom]

Great point John ... but even though we are after a top 10 spot surley it is relevant to know how many other people are optimising for it as well?

[ivana]

o.k. I've been playing with this, lost 20 min and what is interesting, it will lower the competing pages. So first in quotes says, 2200 add the code says, it will say 226. for one case 25 google pages. But as soon as you click on the google page number (for the results at the bottom) it will take you back to 2200?

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Google returns no more than 1,000 results for any search. Therefore, purely looking at a number of "competitors" is mostly a useless exercise when it comes to SEO. Who cares if there are 10,000 pages indexed by Google or 10,000,000 pages indexed by Google for a particular keyword? That number is NOT relevant to whether or not you can rank for a particular keyword phrase.

As I've taught all of my SEO students for a long, long time: the "competition" you need to look at is the first page of Google results.

Of course those who teach poor or lazy SEO or like to tout: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 41,000,000 results! That must PROVE that I'm good at SEO". Uh, no, sorry. But I guess it does sound better than saying: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 1,000 because Google will only return 1,000 results anyway!"

Your "competition" must be judged on STRENGTH and not QUANTITY. Period.

[ivana]

Originally Posted by Steven Carl Kelly

Google returns no more than 1,000 results for any search. Therefore, purely looking at a number of "competitors" is mostly a useless exercise when it comes to SEO. Who cares if there are 10,000 pages indexed by Google or 10,000,000 pages indexed by Google for a particular keyword? That number is NOT relevant to whether or not you can rank for a particular keyword phrase.

As I've taught all of my SEO students for a long, long time: the "competition" you need to look at is the first page of Google results.

Of course those who teach poor or lazy SEO or like to tout: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 41,000,000 results! That must PROVE that I'm good at SEO". Uh, no, sorry. But I guess it does sound better than saying: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 1,000 because Google will only return 1,000 results anyway!"

Your "competition" must be judged on STRENGTH and not QUANTITY. Period.

You are right No body competes for the second page

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Originally Posted by ivana

You are right No body competes for the second page

There may be some traffic on the second page, but I'd wager that the top spots on the first page send a LOT more traffic than any spot on page two.

[Zeus66]

Originally Posted by Steven Carl Kelly

There may be some traffic on the second page, but I'd wager that the top spots on the first page send a LOT more traffic than any spot on page two.

For what it's worth, here are the stats from a leaked AOL document from several years ago re: Google click rates based on the Top 10 SERPs:

* Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of clicks

I think it's interesting that position #9 actually gets slightly fewer clicks than spot #10. It actually does not surprise me though. I think the human eye naturally is drawn to starting and ending points of textual material.

John

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Thanks for posting that, John. I've seen quite a few different takes on the CTR for top Google results. However, many are inaccurate and don't take into account two important factors: search abandonment rate AND the fact that 14% of Google clicks are on Adwords ads. That leaves less than 86% of clicks available for organic search results, and the list above ads up to more than 86%.

[ivana]

I would not say that the first result gets the most. Because, I personally click on any of the first three, and the one that has the really attractive title, gets my attention is the winner!

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Originally Posted by ivana

I would not say that the first result gets the most. Because, I personally click on any of the first three, and the one that has the really attractive title, gets my attention is the winner!

Indeed, the quality of the link title has an effect on the CTR on a page, even though many people simply default to the first link regardless.

[Intrepreneur]

Who told you this? It sounds to crazy for me..

Why not use..

allintitle: "Keywords Here"

Then I know there is a way to subtract from that any of the Warrior Forum pages that pop up in the results.

Found it

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=-site...5274ec352196bc

Anyhow.

allintitle is what your competition is, they are actively competing the information on theri page with your keywords.

[TheRichJerksNet]

some people spend way too much time on trying to figure out who their competition is and what their competition is doing that is actually effects their business...

I personally could'nt care less what my competition stats are, where they are advertising, what results they are getting, and etc .... If I spent all that time on researching my competition I would never make any money and my business would suffer. I care about what "my" stats are, where "my" traffic comes from, what "my" sales volume is and etc ...

I find it funny sometimes how so many people worry about what the competition is doing and they could be doing something productive with their own site to earn money. There are many that worry about what alexa, compete, and other stat websites say... Frankly who cares what they say because their stats are so wrong that it is funny. It is impossible for any of their stats to be correct unless they have a direct link and access to your server...

I have seen many pull up these sites like cubestat.com and sit there and gaze over the incorrect stats thinking they are correct. Well, use the brain god gave you.. These sites can not tell me what my site is worth and they certainly can not tell me what ad revnue my site could be making.

Great example and this is not self promotion but I am going to prove a point. AP I build 100% from the ground up, it was built and "hand" coded from scratch. If a client was to hire me to build this site I would have charged no less than $30,000 and if I was going to sell it right now I would not sell it for no less than $100,000. You see these sites can not say what my site is worth because they are not the ones that built it, they are not the ones that coded the thing.

People spend far too much time wondering what their competition does. Yeah I think we all are guilty of looking up this keyword or that keyword and nothing wrong with that at all... Wasting time and checking every site and every software out there just to ffind out about your competition I think there is something wrong with that because you could have spent that time make improvements on your site or making sales..

This is just my opinion though, for whatever it's worth... Maybe a site like cubestat or alexa could tell me what my opinion is worth....

James